Lost in the stacks

10:00 am - Frustration

This morning I finally remembered to go looking for my most recent issue of the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE). I pay a bit extra to get this publication along with the regular, 10x year, more tradey organization publication. JEE is published quarterly and is a research publication.

Why do I need to go looking for it, you ask. Well, I work in a library, where we are regularly receiving copies of journals as part of the business we do, and we get a copy of this particular publication for our shelves. Last year I needed to recover 1 issue from the shelves and 2 from the duplicates box (destined for recycling). The publication cycle is Jan, Apr, July, Oct so I was figuring my new issue should be around.

I checked the shelves, there is a January issue there, but it's the library copy. OK, verified that the subscription issues have been sent. When to check the duplicates box, and it's EMPTY! It was dumped on Thursday.

In theory, after I pulled all of the issues from last year from random locations, people are supposed to be keeping careful watch for these (both JEE and ASEE Prism, the tradey one) so as to be sure we are getting our personal copies. Despite that, I'm fairly certain my January issue of JEE went to the dumpster on Thursday.

Yes, I can get to the content online, but that's just not the same and really not conducive to carrying around for reading at odd moments between meetings, etc.

Current Mood: annoyed

10:13 am - Planning...

Planning is generally considered a good thing, and I was reminded of that is numerous ways this morning.

So, last night, with considerable lack of thinking or planning, I removed the seal between my tub and wall tile in the bathroom. It's been bad for a long time and I'd finally had enough last night, so what was supposed to be just clean the bathroom turned into a process of fighting with old, moldy caulk mixed with a new layer of silicon caulk.

Got that done, but not sufficiently cleaned up to put the replacement seal on last night. Not a problem, I'll just get up in the morning, go to the gym, run and shower there before work. Sounded like a plan to me.

Then it snowed last night, which was expected. Not a problem, just add shoveling to the list before heading to the gym.

All was well and good, got up, dressed, shoveled the sidewalk, got in the car and headed to campus. This was a trick because on the way I realized just how bad my tires are. I knew I would need tires soon, well, almost not making it up the hill to campus let me know they're BAD.

Got there only to realize that the break hours for the gym means it doesn't open until 11 am! UGH. Worse, this is not a "shower optional" day for me.

Now I'm faced with getting home again, showering in the basement (which is unfinished, so COLD) and then getting back to campus again. All the while it has continued to snow around here.

I get home, but only with luck and some very careful driving up the hill to my house. Got showered, dressed and headed back to campus. I would have preferred to go pursue new tires right then, but I knew I needed to get to the office for computer work that needed to be done on my machine, which was scheduled for 9 am (and the computer was in my bag with me).

So I'm at work, watching it continue to snow, working on one of the 'extra' laptops in my library while IT works on my machine, and trying to decide if I want to leave my car on campus and take the bus home tonight and pursue tires tomorrow, or try to get home tonight and do tires first thing in the morning...

Current Mood: annoyed

07:31 am - Thoughts on running and pace

So, I'd pretty much convinced myself that despite all assurances the 5K course last Friday was short. I really didn't think there was any way I'd completed a full 3.1 miles in 34:07... until my run yesterday afternoon.

I was indoors on the track (since it was rainy/snowy/windy, just plain nasty outside) and turned in 2.9 miles (was supposed to be 3 but I lost count on my way to 28 laps and finished one early) with an average pace of 10:45!!!

I'm not really sure what caused this to happen, but my pace took a huge jump without any conscious effort on my part and to a pace that I have found difficult to maintain in the past. It's a great feeling to have verified that the 5K time was not random or a fluke of a mis-measured course.

Current Mood: happy

12:36 pm - Ending the Procrastination

While the subject is not about my complete lack of posting to LJ in forever, I realized as I was typing it that it certainly could apply.

The real reason for the subject is two-fold. In the last two days I have made progress on things that have been hanging over me with no action and it feels good.

Yesterday I got back to work on my summer research, which didn't happen because I realized, even if only subconsciously at the time, that after 2 courses each semester in the preceding year while working full time, I needed a break, and so I took it. At the expense of the 3 credits of summer research I was supposed to be doing. So, this fall I was supposed to be using my Friday afternoon research time to accomplish my summer research project, but the job creep has been horrific and that has not been happening. So after divulging all to my adviser on Tuesday, we agreed to have me use a desk in the grad student suite, and I actually made progress on returning to this project. I still have to call IRB and double check if they need to see revised documents based on some changes that need to be made, but they're small changes and it's a removal of content, not an add, so I'm hoping I'll be good without revisions.

Today, I ended a 2 week hiatus from the running thing. There were multiple reasons for not having run in the last two weeks, most notably my mom was visiting and I had stuff due in both classes, which had been put off and so took all the time I might have had for running and then some. Additionally, having tenner decide to join my in the Ottawa half marathon and then send my his training plan made me focus again and return to my own training plan. I went out for 3 miles today, without any concern for pace, just to get back in the pattern. It was slow, but felt good.

Now I just need to catch up on the reading for my classes and I'll be feeling really good!

Current Mood: accomplished

09:40 am - Vancouver

Vancouver
Originally uploaded by vanepa.

08:14 pm - Sunset on the St. Lawrence

Sunset on the St. Lawrence
Originally uploaded by vanepa.

05:12 pm - Writer's Block: Call Me

09:30 am - Stupid stuff this weekend

I'm working on a quilt for friends who are having a baby shower this weekend, while I'm out of town. So I need to get it done by Wed. night so I can leave it with another friend for delivery. All well and good so far.

I got the fabric, got it washed, ironed, selvages removed, etc. on Saturday. Sunday afternoon I decide on pattern, etc. and begin cutting out fabric strips. Things are going well until I drop my rotary cutter, with the blade extended, not retracted. No problems with the carpet, but I decided to try and drag it back to me with my foot so I could continue to hold the fabric in place. Bad idea.

So it turned up on edge, I lost my balance, and ended up putting a nasty slice in the arch or my foot with the rotary cutter. The sock is done for (but it was almost done for anyway) and I hobbled my way upstairs to the bathroom and all the first aid stuff. Got a first line taken care of, packed it with a gauze pad and used an ankle wrap to keep everything in place while I went to the drugstore for butterfly bandages, adhesive tape and large band-aids.

Got home, got the foot well cleaned and the wound pulled together again, covered with gauze, and a new sock on that foot. Then went back to work on the quilt.

I'm happy to say the quilt is mostly done and the foot seems to be doing well this morning. It aches, but that's not a big surprise. It would probably feel better if I could keep it elevated, but it's not going to be one of those days.

09:37 am - It's all about the complements

This is a two part entry.

First, the Purdue 'complement guys' have been making big news. It seems their story has been picked up by the following list of news sources, as far as Purdue knows, in the last week or so.

Chicago Tribune, ABC Good Morning America, ABC News, UPI, USA Today, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Salon.com, KNX (Los Angeles), Louisville Courier-Journal, Toledo Blade, Webindia, Post Chronicle (New York), Z100 radio (New York), Utica (N.Y.) Daily News, Fox 41 (Louisville), The Coloradoan (Fort Collins), WRTV (Indianapolis), WTHR (Indianapolis), WSJV (South Bend), WNDU (South Bend), Bloomington Herald-Times, Anderson Herald-Bulletin, Indianapolis Star, Lafayette Journal & Courier, Lafayette Online, Purdue Exponent.

Here's a link to the story and a video, which I happen to be in. I stopped and gave a complement back to the complement guys without knowing I was being filmed.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-compliment-guys-13-mar13,0,6849324.story

Part two, spending time at my conference from Thursday through Sunday just past, and seeing people I haven't seen since June. As many of you may know by now, I've lost 50 pounds since late August 2008, which means these folks haven't seen me since I started this adventure. Lots of comments on how good I look but one takes the cake. I walked up to the IEEE booth, and one of the reps (who also happens to be a Lafayette College grad) took one look at me and said immediately "It's half an Amy!" Thank you Kris, that comment made my day and much of my conference and things like that certainly help on the motivation end for continuing the process.

Current Mood: happy

08:32 am - Someone was thinking

Someone was thinking
Originally uploaded by vanepa.

07:29 pm - time for an update

Well, it's been forever since I just provided a "state of me" post, so here we go.

Life is good in general. Keeping quite busy, but that's to be expected.

I have just completed the weekly requirements for my classes this semester, so I'm ready to head into another week of class fully prepared. I love that feeling! The challenge is maintaining that preparedness as the semester progresses, March is going to be particularly difficult this year, as I have a conference and a trip to Arizona for my grandmother's 90th birthday, which both mean I loose my primary study/reading day, which is Saturday.

But that's just the class side, now I need to spend time catching up on all of my work-related stuff that didn't get done last week, most particularly performance review information for the 4 staff members I supervise. I really don't like this time of year. I know, I say this every year. And once again, I have no people I really need to call to task during this process, it's just stressful having the fate of someone else's raise in your hands (provided we'll even get raises this year, which looks doubtful).

So tomorrow gets to entail writing at least the one of those 4, the one that has to be done for Monday, when I meet with that staff member.

I also have to complete my proposal for a summer research project, which I intended to have to my adviser by Friday afternoon, but that didn't happen, and I didn't even remember I said I'd have it done until late Friday night.

Add to this fun mix the fact that it's a concert weekend! Yippee. So I lost 4 hours this morning to dress rehearsal. Tomorrow is church, then home to get my concert clothes and eat lunch and then 1-2:30 rehearsal, 3-5ish concert and then home again to continue with work. I was contemplating going to the local civic theater production of the "Man who came to dinner" tonight, but I think I need to spend at least some of the 3 hours that would have been in the theater getting other work done.

On the plus side, it got into the 40's today and is supposed to stay there through Tuesday. It feels like spring is arriving and I love it. I know we'll get some more cold weather, but right now it's nice to have the ice and snow melting away.

Current Mood: busy

11:18 am - Looking for input

This is quick, but I would like to know your thoughts, as library users...

Should food and drink be allowed in university libraries? And why?

yes / no / certain locations / certain foods / only some containers

Tell me what you think!

Current Mood: curious

09:30 am - At work

.. and it's slow, so I figured I'd join the crowd.

Current Mood: mellow

10:40 am - Wordle clouds from papers

Well, following the trend of some of my classmates, I thought I'd create a word cloud from the content of my class essays.

You can find them here:

Current Mood: creative

09:13 am - Book meme

from binxcat and reynardo:
Grab the nearest book.
* Open it to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

"This in fact allows the correct formulation of the concept of lost work relevant to an aerospace vehicle flow-field."

From A Collection of the 14th AIAA/AHI International Space Planes and Hypersonic systems and technologies conference, Technical papers, volume 1 Held in Canberra, Australia, 6-9 Nov. 2006.

10:43 am - Voted early

I was up and out the door early this morning. I walked to my polling place, for a good 25 minutes of exercise before hand, and again after.

I was in line at 6 am. Yes, in line. I was about 50 or more people back, and there were lots more people showing up behind me. Thankfully, my preferred vote center had 24 machines set up, so things moved along fairly quickly. 30 minutes total in the polling location.

Current Mood: accomplished

10:11 am - Travelling, food, and weight loss

So yesterday was weigh-in. Based on my morning check on my home scale, I was up a pound complements of all the food, wine and beer consumed while in NYC.

So... imagine my surprise when I got to weigh-in at noon yesterday and ended up with a number that was actually -.6 pounds!!! Yippee!

Honestly, had I maintained for the last week I would have considered it a triumph, but to actually lose, even a little, was downright amazing! I must admit it was quite helpful having 2 other people at the meeting who are currently on Weight Watchers. We all sort of used each other as guides, looking to see what the other was doing. Most often at least one of the 3 of us was being good when one wanted to cave, so it worked well. I'm quite happy to say I'm the only one of the 3 of us who did get up and exercise each morning and I'm sure that helped.

Walking around Brooklyn for an hour and a half on Sat. morning with my sister also helped, particularly given that dinner on Friday night wasn't until 10:30 pm! Ugh.

The trip itself was good. IEEE treats their volunteers very well at meetings like this one, so not only were my airfare and room paid for, but all my meals during the meeting, including a morning and afternoon snack, which almost always had a fruit option, so it wasn't just cookies and pastries, which I really appreciated.

Dinner out 2 nights, both with free flowing cocktails and wine and then wonderful meals. Thursday was the real challenge... we were at Carmine's, which is a family style Italian-American place on 44th street, just a couple doors from the St. James theater, where we were headed after dinner.

This place is amazing, and since our selections had been made in advance, it was just a matter of sitting there and having platter after platter delivered to the table. I think it was a total of 6 courses. Salad, fried calamari, appetizers (mussels, mushrooms, eggplant, polenta, rizzoto, baked clams and some other things), pasta (big, fresh ravioli and pasta with broccoli and sausage (I think) in a light cream sauce), meat (chicken marsala, veal on a bed of spinach and other stuff, shrimp in a tomato sauce and sauted peppers and onions) and then desert, including a tiramisu that was heavenly!

To walk away from that table and not feel completely stuffed was a huge accomplishment. Yeah me!

One final highlight of this trip, my flights were all on time and there were no travel problems. It was amazing.

Current Mood: happy

09:16 am - Homework woes

So I spent a large part of my weekend working on a film analysis which is due in class this evening. The written analysis part wasn't the problem, it was the presentation with film clips that sucked in my time.

Step one, get clips off a DVD into a form that plays nice with PPT. Sounds easy right, well after ripping the DVD 3 times, twice to get only video and once to get only audio it was 8 pm on Sunday night. I called P, who has video editing software on his machine and went visiting. A little over an hour later I had my 5 clips, video and audio, in .wmv and .avi formats. Yeah, now to go home and finish the presentation.

My original intention, load the clips into PPT and just play the whole thing from there. Great idea, but it doesn't function very well. It seem PPT doesn't actually copy the videos in, just sort of link to them, and does weird things with the video feed. The .avi files will play the audio, but never show the video inside PPT. As for the .wmv, NONE of what I included in the PPT got all the way through (and most are under a minute) without the video freezing. The sound went on just fine.

So, I ended up with a PPT presentation with a bunch of links out to the .avi files and I'll just have a player fire up and watch the clips that way.

At least I got what I need and can get through the presentation quickly without having to find my place on a DVD in front of the class.

Current Mood: tired

11:23 am - News re: RPI EMPAC

Just saw the following post in my daily professional spam from the American Society for Engineering Education. They picked it up from the NYT.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute builds new high-tech facility.
The New York Times (9/23, F2, Overbye) reported, "On a hillside overlooking this college town on the banks of the Hudson, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has erected a technological pleasure dome for the mind and senses. Eight years and $200 million in the making, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, or Empac, resembles an enormous 1950s-era television set." However, "inside are not old-fashioned vacuum tubes but the stuff of 21st-century high-tech dreams dedicated to the marriage of art and science as it has never been done before, its creators say -- 220,000 square feet of theaters, studios and work spaces hooked to supercomputers."

Current Mood: chipper

08:16 am - sleepy and weigh in

Sleepy. Not falling asleep until sometime after 1 am can do that to a person. Still not sure what allowed by body or brain to finally shut down and let me sleep, but there it is. I'm dragging and it's one of those days where I was out of the house by 7:30 and I won't be back until 10 pm.

It's work, then rehearsal, then another rehearsal and then home.

Forgot this info yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday was weigh-in for weight watchers. This week: down 3.2 pounds
Total lost thus far: 14.4 lbs

Now off to department grad school pictures. They want the same background on them all, so I need to go let them snap a picture. At least I get a walk in as a result.

Current Mood: sleepy